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Mobile Ethereum Client Status Partners With OmiseGo

Status, the mobile ethereum client which reportedly raised $100 million within 24 hours during its ICO last year, plans to integrate decentralized exchange DEX onto its platform. DEX is being developed by OmiseGO, a subsidiary of Omise, a Singapore-based payment gateway. In its online guide, the company describes DEX as being a scalable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain on which any form of digital asset can be traded. It has an ERC 20 token OMG that is worth $831 million in crypto markets, as of this writing. Status describes itself as an interface for ethereum that enables access to decentralized apps on its blockchain as well as a cryptocurrency wallet.

The integration offers a number of benefits for both companies. For starters, the DEX integration is expected to enable interoperability for on-chain and cross-chain transactions (or transactions between different blockchains, such as bitcoin and ethereum) through clearinghouses in state channels or smart contracts. The integration will enable collateralized fiat tokens (meaning stablecoins like Tether). The partnership will extend to other areas of blockchain research and scalability of cryptocurrencies.

“Significant research and development must go into the underlying client level applications to ensure these technologies can be used by anyone,” said Nabil Naghdy, COO of Status. Key areas of cooperation between the two sides are Plasma – a layer 2 technology that anticipates conducting transactions off ethereum’s blockchain – and Sharding, which envisages partitioning the blockchain into a number of blocks, each one responsible for processing independent transactions. Both concepts are considered key growth areas to scale ethereum.

“By partnering with OmiseGo, we can collaborate on R&D as well as make the use cases and usability of Status more robust for everyone; not simply those interested in Ethereum or a specific type of cryptocurrency/blockchain,” said Naghdy. “Integration with the DEX will provide more use cases for tools like Status to the end user-further advancing the web3 ecosystem.”

Commenting on the state of the mobile ethereum ecosystem today, Naghdy said there is much more work to be done. “It is hard to say exactly when many practical decentralized applications will be widely used on mobile. Status has just moved into Beta with the release of 0.9.21, but there remains a lot of work to be undertaken across the entire industry before we’ll see scalable, production-ready systems. No exact date is defined at the moment,” he said.